IT IS WITH OUR FACES that we face the world, from the moment of birth to the moment of death. Our age and our sex are printed on our faces. Our emotions, the open and instinctive emotions which Darwin...
I went back into the house and had put on the kettle for another cup of tea when my attention was caught by a spider on the kitchen wall. As I drew nearer to look at it, the spider called out, Hello!...
I have traversed many kinds of health, and keep traversing them... and as for sickness: are we not almost tempted to ask whether we could get along without it? Only great pain is the liberator of the...
I had returned to piano-playing and music lessons when I had turned seventy-five (having written about how even older people can learn new skills, I thought it was time to take my own advice).
I did much of my writing in a little alcove by the bar, where I could be alone, private, invisible, yet warmed and stimulated by the vivid life at the bar.
Harlan Lane and Franklin Philip have done a great service in making these so readily available to us in The Deaf Experience. Especially moving and important are the 1779 Observations of Pierre Desloge...
Grasshoppers, by a special biblical dispensation, are kosher, unlike most invertebrates.
Diseases have a character of their own, but they also partake of our character; we have a character of our own, but we also partake of the world’s character: character is monadic or microcosmic, world...
Dangerous wellness, morbid brilliance, a deceptive euphoria with abysses beneath – THIS is the trap promised and threatened by nature – in the form of some intoxicating disorder, or by ourselves in th...
But it was not easy to believe that anyone cared for me; I sometimes failed to realize, I think, how much my parents cared for me. It is only now, reading the letters they wrote to me when I came to A...
Auden poem, Let your last thinks all be thanks,
At worst, one is in motion; and at best, Reaching no absolute, in which to rest, One is always nearer by not keeping still.
At eighty, one can take a long view and have a vivid, lived sense of history not possible at an earlier age.
As for sickness: are we not almost tempted to ask whether we could get along without it?’—and
And go to San Francisco! It’s one of the twelve most interesting cities in the world. California has immense contrasts—the utmost wealth and the most hideous squalor. But there’s beauty and interest e...
And I myself was wrung with emotion -- it was heartbreaking, it was absurd, it was deeply perplexing, to think of his life lost in limbo, dissolving.
An animal, or a man, may get on very well without ‘abstract attitude’ but will speedily perish if deprived of judgment. Judgment must be the first faculty of higher life or mind—yet it is ignored, or...
An alcoholic has a personality change after a drink or two, but a drunk can drink as much as he wants. I’m a drunk.
All the trouble starts when people forget they're human.
All the colours I have ever beheld are dull as compared to these.